As data and AI company SAS hits its 50th anniversary, the organization is meeting the moment by continuing to strengthen partnerships while positioning itself around human-centric, responsible AI.
During SAS Innovate 2026, Channel Insider sat down with John Carey, VP, Global Channels, SAS, to discuss partnerships, lessons learned, and the future of AI adoption.
How SAS is deepening its Microsoft partnership
Last year, Carey referenced that over the next 50 years of the company, achieving growth will require engaging with SAS’s full ecosystem of partners, including Microsoft and AWS.
The relationship with Microsoft has deepened over the past year and, according to Carey, has matured into a structured collaboration with clear expectations.
“I think we’ve made some very conscious decisions in our relationship with Microsoft and to hold our field accountable – to become educated around the value of planning with Microsoft and the value of leveraging the Microsoft Marketplace as a vehicle for transactions to occur,” said Carey.
“At the same time, we’ve done some great work with our product group … So when I think about last year, I think we doubled down and recommitted. Being very clear on holding each other accountable around GTM objectives.”
Why marketplace transactions are the ‘North Star’ as compute demand grows
Measuring SAS’s value to Microsoft through marketplace transactions has given the organizations this North Star to line up their enterprise sellers up so they can take advantage of the programs that Microsoft has made available to SAS around driving adoption and compute consumption.
“We’re really leaning into those telemetry points and they do a phenomenal job,” said Carey. “As we move to the cloud, our worlds are converging. What Microsoft Account Managers were able to do is help us navigate the IT via profile and the CIO concerns, with anyone that was a critical system. There’s nothing but positive goodness coming from our mutual recommitment.”
The word from Microsoft, a key partner of SAS Innovate, was a strong agreement on how the SAS-Microsoft partnership is evolving.
“I feel that this year we’ve got a lot more momentum than in years past,” said Michael Weaver, Director of Customer Assistance, Microsoft. “I think it’s really because the collaboration has opened up between our channel, our strategic partnership group, and SAS’s.”
Expanding the partner ecosystem
SAS has also formalized Google Cloud compute as an option for its SAS Cloud offering at the end of 2025. The organization continues to be cloud first, but is positioned to meet the customer where they are with strong technical relationships across the spectrum, all in service of the client.
“That is a strategic relationship that is emerging,” Carey said, adding that the impact of the concept of sovereign cloud has created an opportunity with Red Hat, which was already a strong strategic partner of SAS.
“There have been some macro conditions that have created some disruption – like the emergence of European regional cloud players, the race into the sovereign cloud space, but also the re-emergence of on premises as an option to either address sovereign cloud or to address significant cost overrun in a cloud scenario and a desire to have a more hybrid and control deployment scenario.”
AI as a new inflection point
Carey notes that the industry is at an inflection point, similar to how data center as a utility transformed from data center a unique value. Except now it’s the impact of AI, not only delivering a conversation around disruption from a business perspective, but also a disruptive conversation socially.
Carey agrees that there’s a lot of interest that can be generated, but there’s also a lot of justifiable suspicion. SAS used a significant portion of the Innovate 2026 conference to emphasize the importance of a “People Must Matter” philosophy to the industry.
“What is fundamentally in the SAS culture is people must matter,” Carey said, echoing similar sentiments from SAS CTO Bryan Harris. “And therefore, the data, the AI has to serve people.”
Organizations must recognize bias in data and build ethical frameworks and tools to help with this next phase of AI adoption. It’s important to understand what your data is and to tune it to identify what is underrepresented and what is overrepresented.
Carey said the industry must “stare that in the face and acknowledge it” otherwise we won’t have the outcomes we want, we’ll simply repeat the outcomes that didn’t work for us in the past.
The stakes of AI are very real. Recognizing the risks versus the opportunities is critical. AI has the potential for calamity, but also for re-leveling data and understanding.
“Maybe we can cure cancer sooner than we ever thought we could. Maybe we can find that next drug that changes lives around the world,” said Carey. “
We tend to believe in the arc of history moving towards justice over time. AI could be an accelerant for that. It requires responsibility, a human-centric approach, and an acknowledgement that we’re making decisions based on data. We have to understand what their data is and we have to be able to tune the data for what is underrepresented and what is overrepresented.”
Los Angeles FC shows power of practical AI
SAS’s partnership with Los Angeles FC offers an example of human-centered AI in practice. LAFC has used the adoption of AI to fuel collaboration and engagement with the fan base.
“All of their decisions are about informing and being informed by the cultural heart of their community and when I think about that use case and the rules they put in place and the principles they had to agree on, that’s a great template for thinking about how we approach AI, agentic AI, and use cases in all other areas,” Carey explained.
Strengthening partner relationships with visibility
Going forward, in strengthening partners’ relationships – from Microsoft to LAFC to Princeton IT Services – preparing partners for market conversations and providing strong roadmap visibility will be key for SAS’s channel strategy.
Speaking to Mahendra Keshavpatnam, Senior Director, AI & Analytics, Princeton IT Services, during the conference, he posited that the next phase of partnerships with SAS could be a way to better position themselves with customers by gaining more information about a product before it hits the market. Nothing proprietary, but enough for them to go to customers in a stronger position.
When asked about this suggestion, Carey took a pragmatic approach to this thought:
“I think how I interpret that is: better roadmap visibility for our partners so they can get ahead of conversations and prepare the ground before our events. That’s a natural thing that I’ve heard throughout my career. It’s like ‘Hey, man, if you could have told me this two weeks before, I think our customers here look like this, not like that.’ Now, the challenge with that is you’ve also got a vendor going ‘Well, the minute I start to communicate this, it’s out, right?’”
Carey adds “I think what we have to do is do a better job talking about roadmap thematically, so that Mahendra at Princeton IT and other partners have a sense of where we’re going and can speak to that, and then give them some early visibility of what we’re doing at events so they get a couple days heads up and they can orchestrate their customers.”
It’s a fine line, Carey says, between wanting to give partners as much information as possible to position them for success, and, as a steward of the company, he understands that placing the burden of information on partners can have various consequences.
“Knowledge is amazing, but knowledge isn’t always well received and you have to be able to deal with it maturely,” Carey explained. “And so I think we’re going to have to thread that needle and keep threading it. We may never get it right, but we’ll keep aspiring to it.”
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